By Susan Salter Reynolds
“UNDOCUMENTED immigrants,” Luis Alberto Urrea writes in his foreword, “have no way to tell you what they have experienced. . . . They are, by the very nature of their experience, invisible.”
There are 24 stories documented here. Editor Peter Orner and a team of graduate students from San Francisco State University went looking for stories for Voice of Witness, which publishes “oral histories of people around the world who have had their human and civil rights violated.” The storytellers hold many different jobs, have different reasons for leaving home and different expectations about U.S. life. Mr. Lai left China after officials found that he and his wife had violated the one-child policy. Saleem, 54, was summarily deported to Pakistan after Sept. 11. Roberto came from Mexico at 14; it took him 30 years to get a green card. “Everything we do is a crime,” says a Mexican man called El Mojado. “You don’t have papers, it’s a crime. You buy fake papers, it’s a crime.” Elizabeth, an English teacher in Bolivia, came to the U.S. in 2004 to get help for her 8-year-old daughter, diagnosed with a severe form of arthritis. With no money, she slid through the American underworld, down the steps that so many of these people describe: rape, robbery, exploitation and a complete lack of credibility — no way to get help, and no way out.
Decades after arriving, many want desperately to go home and cannot. “I wouldn’t make it back across,” says Adela, a Mexican woman who has been here for 18 years and longs to see her family but doesn’t dare leave her children. “No, there are too many that have died in the desert, too many who have drowned.”
